Energy consumption has become a critical issue for large scale computing facilities (or data centers), triggered by the rise in energy costs, supply and demand of energy and the proliferation of power hungry information and communication technology (ICT) equipment. Data centers consume approximately two percent (%) of all electricity globally or 183 billion kilowatt (KW) hours of power; this power consumption is growing at a rate of 12% each year. A significant fraction of the power consumption, i.e., up to 50%, is directed to cooling the heat generating equipment. Consequently, the improvement of data center energy and cooling efficiency is very important. Although best practices have been widely publicized, data center operators are struggling to provision the right amount of cooling. In particular, it is challenging to take different heat densities within a data center into account (i.e., different areas within the data center may require very different amounts of cooling).
Therefore techniques directed to highlighting heat densities within a data center and thereby increasing cooling efficiency would be desirable.